A list of projects and tools – many in the content/asset management and collaboration area.

A list of full time and part time employees – the team is growing!

In the past 6 months, I’ve only had time for a handful of
tiny commits to the Blender code. As much as I love coding and work on
Blender itself, I’m also quite useful for other tasks – especially to
help the Blender project to grow, become more professional and to get
more developers on board.Blender has grown as a community and volunteering project very well
in the past decade, but the current user demands and our ambitions also
require that we need more full-time developers on board. The past Open
Movies have helped with that, and last year the Development Fund and
gifts from sponsors allowed us to hire more people as well.

vineri, 20 decembrie 2013

Picture Cutout Guide separates solid objects from an arbitrary
background and transfers them to another photo. The software offers
these tools: Wide Edge – allows separation of an object from its
background and storage for later making a picture collage, applies
background effects; Paste Object – pastes a separated image into another
photo, makes a collage of pictures, fulfils export and import of the
objects; Smart Patch – replaces one area of the photo with a “patch”
from another area of the photo; Text; Resize; Crop; Rotation.

sâmbătă, 14 decembrie 2013

iSkysoft Video Converter Ultimate is a comprehensive video tool that
helps you to convert more than 150 video types, including AVI, MP4, WMV
and more. It allows you to rip DVDs and convert videos to play anywhere
with original quality. The 30X converting speed makes the program a real
life saver. You’ll also be able to download and convert online videos
from popular online video sites such as Youtube and Hulu.

marți, 10 decembrie 2013

There is a new generation of Photosynth (Microsoft) with 3D image technology. The software application generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object.
The prior two versions of Microsoft Photosynth, which offer the
original synths and stitched panoramas, are still available on the main
Photosynth website.
Meanwhile, the updated technology
now supports four basic experiences: “spin,” “panorama,” “walk” and
“wall” - see Synth types bellow. As their respective names describe, each offers a different kind
of 3D image viewing experience – a spin around an object as small as a
teacup or as large as a glacial peak, Microsoft explains, a panoramic
view, a walk – like down a path through the woods, for example – or a
slide across a scene.

Synth Types

Photosynth : spin
Spin around an object as small as a seashell or as large as a mountain.

Photosynth : panorama
Put yourself in the center of a space and look in every direction.

Photosynth : walk
Follow a path through the woods or fly toward a destination.

Photosynth : wall
Slide across a scene, checking out every last detail.

iResizer enables new smart ways of resizing images without deforming
or cropping the content. It can scale an image without changing
important visual content such as people, buildings, animals, etc. While
normal resizing affects all pixels uniformly when scaling an image,
iResizer resizing mostly affects pixels in areas that do not have
important visual content.
It also can be used to remove portion of the image in a consistent way.

vineri, 6 decembrie 2013

Aiseesoft Blu-ray Ripper is one of the best Blu-ray ripping software
that can help users rip their Blu-ray movies easily to High Definition
video and common video files for editing, watching on
computer/devices/HDTV, backup. It provides users as many output profiles
as you can imagine, such as MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI, WMV, FLV, iPad, iPhone,
iPod, PSP, Samsung Tablet, Samsung Galaxy Note, etc. With ATI and CUDA
hardware acceleration tech, the HD output with h.264 encoder is no
longer a problem. Aiseesoft Blu-ray Ripper will not let you to wait for a
whole night just rip a Blu-ray disc to HD video and it provides a 6X
Faster conversion speed.
With ATI and CUDA hardware acceleration tech, the HD output with
h.264 encoder is no longer a problem. Aiseesoft Blu-ray Ripper will not
let you to wait for a whole night just rip a Blu-ray disc to HD video
and it provides a 6X Faster conversion speed.
In addition, Aiseesoft Blu-ray Ripper can also rip DVD and convert
videos to any video format you want. It allows users to edit the output
video’s effect, trim output video’s length, remove the black bars of the
movie. You can easily choose your favorite subtitle and audio track
from the Blu-ray/DVD movies when you convert the movie.

joi, 21 noiembrie 2013

Genie Timeline 2013 Pro is a backup/restore tool aimed at providing
complete, seamless and reliable backups and restores. Genie Timeline
makes it easy to continuously protect all your files no matter where
they are stored; on your computer, external and network drives. Genie
Timeline works automatically to protect new and changed files without
any intervention.

Key features:

Configure your backup in 3 simple steps and you’re done! It scans
for all your file selections from any location, monitors for new and
changed files, and backs them up;

Use the Timeline to view and restore your files at a specific point of time;

Secure your backup with the most secure 256-AES encryption algorithm;

Recover versions of a file or deleted files with a right-click;

Use Genie Timeline mobile app for live feedback of your backup
status or get email notifications of your backup status to your inbox;

Use backup without compression so you can view your backed up files in their native form from any computer;

Genie Timeline offers advanced settings to ensure that power users
have all they need in a simple, easy to use product. You can control
when your backup runs or leave it to Genie’s IntelliCDP, power down your
computer after backup, and much more;

Use disaster recovery to keep your entire system safe from virus attacks, computer crashes, and more.

luni, 18 noiembrie 2013

Picture Collage Maker Pro is a versatile and user-friendly collage
creator with which you can make collages and greeting cards from digital
photos and share them with friends and family. It provides 140+ collage
templates for various occasions and holidays such as birthday, baby,
wedding, anniversary, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year and more.
Picture Collage Maker Pro is extremely user-friendly. Unlike
photography software that takes days to master, Picture Collage Maker
Pro lets both seasoned collagers and new hobbyists become productive in
minutes.

miercuri, 13 noiembrie 2013

The Krita team is working really hard on the next release -- Krita
2.8, expected to be released end of December, early January. And it's
shaping up to be a memorable release! There is a host of interesting
features, and many, many bug fixes as well. Let's take a look at what's
coming!

Tablet Support

Krita has relied on Qt's graphics tablet support since Krita 2.0. We
consciously dropped our own X11-level code in favour of the
cross-platform API that Qt offered. And apart from the lack of support
for non-Wacom tablets, this was mostly enough on X11. On Windows, the
story was different, and we were confronted by problems with offsets,
bad performance, no support for tablets with built-in digitizers like
the Lenovo Helix.
So, with leaden shoes, we decided to dive in, and do our own tablet
support. This was mostly done by Dmitry Kazakov during a week-long visit
to Deventer, sponsored by the Krita Foundation. We now have our own
code on X11 and Windows. Drawing is much, much smoother because we can
process much more information and issues with offsets are gone.

OpenGL and Shaders

Krita was one of the first painting applications to support OpenGL to
render the image. And while OpenGL gave us awesome performance when
rotating, panning or zooming, rendering quality was lacking a bit.
That's because by default, OpenGL scales using some fast, but
inaccurate algorithms. Basically, the user had the choice between grainy
and blurry rendering.
Again, as part of his sponsored work by the Krita Foundation, Dmitry
took the lead and implemented a high-quality scaling algorithm on top of
the modern, shader-based architecture Boudewijn had originally
implemented.
The result? Even at small zoom levels, the high-quality scaling option gives beautiful and fast results!

vineri, 8 noiembrie 2013

Brief tutorial (23 minutes) by Paul Caggegi that explains the basics of video editing, and shows
you how to set up Blender as a Non Linear Editor. A .blend
file with the windows layout and a key configuration file are available for download via the blog post.

miercuri, 6 noiembrie 2013

Fragmentarium is an open source, cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU.
It is inspired by Adobe's Pixel Bender, but uses GLSL, and is created specifically with fractals and generative systems in mind.

vineri, 1 noiembrie 2013

FBX import is now supported, along with improved export. New mesh modeling tools were added and existing ones improved. Cycles subsurface scattering and hair shading were improved, along with the addition of a new sky model, shading nodes and tone mapping in the viewport. The motion tracker now supports plane tracking, to track and replace flat objects in footage.

We have been testing this final release using three 'release candidates'. The official release is now available, published October 30th 2013.

Hugin 2013.0 simplifies panorama stitching

New version of the popular panorama stitcher is now even friendlier
towards beginners.
Now the user interface of Hugin
has three modes: Simple (default), Advanced, and Expert. The simple UI
is basically the old panorama preview dialog with panorama stitching
wizard added on top of it, so you can still create a panorama in just
three steps.
If you are not familiar with the procedure, it's all dead easy.
1. Add original images.

2. Launch alignment of the pictures. Hugin will attempt to discover matching features in pairs of images and re-align them.

This step is also where you pick mapping (e.g. Panini is great for
architecture) and set cropping to remove "leftovers" — bits of the
original images mashed with black background due to transformmations.
3. Finally, choose how you want Hugin to handle stacks of exposure
bracketed images, if you have those, pick a file format to save the
panorama in, and let it build the final image for you.

All the extra things like editing control points, creating masks to
remove objects etc. are only visible in Advanced and Expert modes. Which
is where you see the old main window of Hugin.
Frankly speaking, if you are already faimiliar with Hugin, you will
probably find the user interface related changes not exactly dramatic.
After all, Hugin developers preserved most of what already was there and
rearranged guts in limbs in a different way (still, no drama).
Typically for Hugin, the release comes with a few new command line tools: